My attention has been drawn to a letter by Joseph A. Muscat (Judgement On The Church, July 28), which he wrote while I was abroad. In it he accuses me of “castigating” (sic) the Maltese Church over its role in the recent referendum on divorce.

Castigating the Church could not have been further from my intention or the truth. I was deeply critical – and still am – of the Maltese Church’s conduct in the divorce campaign. But it is criticism motivated by disappointment that a once-great human institution with a capacity to do good has brought itself low by its own folly and misjudgement.

The Church’s involvement in the referendum was ill-judged, ill-advised and ill-led. By any objective measure, its investment of €180,000 in an essentially lay campaign was utterly unwarranted.

How can Prof. Muscat, or any other apologist, possibly justify such expenditure by the Church when it now refuses any form of financial compensation to the victims of clerical abuse and rape, crimes for which it has to shoulder ultimate responsibility?

How can the Maltese Church apologise – as it rightly did, though only when it saw the writing on the wall – to those it may have offended during the divorce campaign and now say it is sorry to the victims of rape when the overwhelming feeling is that it should be deeply ashamed of what it has done and pay heavy compensation accordingly?

Perhaps, before Prof. Muscat again makes such leaden attempts at sarcasm as he did in his recent letter, he might apply his mind – informed of course by his accumulated years of knowledge as a surgeon and doctor of medicine and, therefore, far more qualified than I to assess such issues – to providing satisfactory answers to these two questions.